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"Just" This is some serious black magic, especially if it actually works. Even if it only works some of the time I give it an A for effort, since they could ea

by api 6y ago

"Just" This is some serious black magic, especially if it actually works. Even if it only works some of the time I give it an A for effort, since they could easily have just said "JITs will not work with Rosetta." Most applications do not contain JITs. My guess is there are enough important Mac apps that contain JITs of some form to merit this work, probably high performance math and graphics kernels that JIT processing pipelines or something like that. I wonder if some pro studio editing applications do this.

needusername 6y ago
> Most applications do not contain JITs. Java apps and JavaScript apps (Electron) come to mind.
- api 6y ago
  True, but those are trivial to port as there are already mature JDKs and JavaScript VMs for ARM64. Porting an electron app should be a matter of checking it out and building it with ARM support. Applications with internal JITs custom-built for X64 are going to be a lot tougher.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Electron doesn't support aarch64 builds compiled from aarch64 hosts yet (so you have to cross compile), and doesn't support cross compiling if you have any native code addons. Some apps out there are between a rock and a hard place if it weren't for rosetta.
    - dtech 6y ago
      I suspect this will change fairly soon now that there will be a significant non-mobile aarch64 market in the future
      - monocasa 6y ago
        There's still a non trivial amount of time to get that propagated. First merged into chromium, the merged into electron, then actually used by the client programs.
        coldtea 6y ago
        I'd say it would still be less than the first ARM Mac shipping time
pgwhalen 6y ago
>This is some serious black magic If there were ever a time and a place for black magic, it would be this use case: swapping out an enormous layer (the hardware) at the bottom of the stack, while keeping everything at the top of the stack working seamlessly.

by api 6y ago

needusername 6y ago

> Most applications do not contain JITs. Java apps and JavaScript apps (Electron) come to mind.

api 6y ago
True, but those are trivial to port as there are already mature JDKs and JavaScript VMs for ARM64. Porting an electron app should be a matter of checking it out and building it with ARM support. Applications with internal JITs custom-built for X64 are going to be a lot tougher.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Electron doesn't support aarch64 builds compiled from aarch64 hosts yet (so you have to cross compile), and doesn't support cross compiling if you have any native code addons. Some apps out there are between a rock and a hard place if it weren't for rosetta.
  - dtech 6y ago
    I suspect this will change fairly soon now that there will be a significant non-mobile aarch64 market in the future
    - monocasa 6y ago
      There's still a non trivial amount of time to get that propagated. First merged into chromium, the merged into electron, then actually used by the client programs.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        I'd say it would still be less than the first ARM Mac shipping time

pgwhalen 6y ago

>This is some serious black magic If there were ever a time and a place for black magic, it would be this use case: swapping out an enormous layer (the hardware) at the bottom of the stack, while keeping everything at the top of the stack working seamlessly.